Featured Artist: Emily McIlroy

Name and/or alias(es):

Emily McIlroy

Hometown:

Norman, Oklahoma

“Day job”:

Graduate Assistant, Introduction to Drawing, UH Mānoa

Instructor, Art-to-Go Outreach Program, Honolulu Academy of Arts

Latest book/movie/music you’ve consumed:

Book-A Prayer for Owen Meany

Movie-A Mighty Wind, Cashback, Awakenings

Music- The Album Leaf, Bonobo, Tommy Guerrero

Website or artist you think is worth checking out:

Peter Doig, Craig Nagasawa, Simen Johan, Philip Taaffe,  Andy Goldsworthy

Greatest accomplishment yet:

Surviving 27 years

Inspirations:

All things natural and wild, the ocean, dreams, the “paranormal”, my beautiful twin brother

Suggestions for fellow artists:

Let your life be research, your work be a gift to the world, and your studio be a sanctuary.

Artistic weapon(s) of choice:

Just give me a camera, oil paints, and some blank canvas

Details or notes regarding any of your featured works:

Created from layered topographies of visual imagery, my paintings serve as metaphors for information seen and unseen, known and unknown, observed and intuited. The focus of my research has been a search for metaphysical evidence of life after death, and my practice has centered on developing a visual language that addresses a need to reconcile loss with an intuitive desire for connection.

Composed of various laminae of both opaque and transparent paint, mediums, graffitied surfaces and photo transfers, my works aspire to pictorially manifest the idea of reality as a fluctuating choreography of emergence and evanescence.

My recent incorporation of marine imagery serves as a visual representation of a world to which we both do and do not belong, a metaphorical place for meeting with departed loved ones.

There are certain spaces, both on land and underwater, that seem inhabited by the phantoms of everything that used to be. Now and then, I feel that if I look hard enough, I can find what I have lost.  My work arises from the fantasy that I could somehow get it back.

People can see more of what you do:

at www.emilymcilroy.com